Tuesday, 8 September 2015

Transforming transport planning in the postpolitical era

This research examines the transformation
of the democratic systems that support transport decision making in Australian
cities. The focus of the paper is the controversial East West Link road tunnel
proposed for the inner suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. Following the state
government decision to fast track the signing of the contracts for this
project, concern that this would remove public debate about the efficacy of the
proposed tunnel eventually proved unfounded. Instead, the closing down of
debate by the government spurred debate to occur elsewhere.My ambition in this project was to understand
the intricacies of the opposition to this controversial road project, but, more
specifically, to examine the ways in which different community-based groups organised
to stop a project and do so in a way that offers a transformative urban transport
agenda for the State. When a government deliberately closes its door to open
citizen engagement, particularly around discussions of transport priorities, I
was interested in investigating how community based groups and individual
residents alike can move beyond NIMBY-focused and site specific agitation to
garner a spatially dispersed re-politicisation of urban transport priorities? I
set out to consider how a reconceptualisation could transpire, and in what ways
could a political orientation of the problem provide a platform for a
redemocratisation of transport planning?

When the research commenced, I was nearing
the end of my semester of teaching Integrated Transport Planning. Motivated by
the high level of student activism that catalysed the creation of the Students
Linking Melbourne Sustainably (SLiMS) group, my research assistant Daniela
Minicucci and I set out to follow and engage groups like SLiMS through an
ethnographic study of the politicisation of transport in Melbourne. This included
participation in community organised street protests, engagement in public
forums and debates about urban transport policy at community meetings and in
the media. I also followed Twitter feeds and hastage discussions as well as
participated in meetings with leaders in the community campaign against the
East West Link. To develop a more robust
understanding of the motivations and strategies embraced by the groups, and to
help with my analysis of the variety of ways these groups were working
collectively to stop the project, I also conducted 15 semi-structured interviews
with the lead campaigners. Even though the substantive aspect of my research
focused on a 6 month period of state-led community engagement with a highly
flawed Comprehensive Impact Statement process, my interest in these groups
continued unabatedly into the state election in November 2014 when, following
months of political pressure from these groups in the lead up to the election,
and after signing the contracts, the party in power was defeated. Through the
campaign, which included savvy engagement with the political parties and major
media outlets, the community-based groups were able to position the project
onto the state’s political agenda in the lead up to the election. This enabled
the newly elected government to remove the East West Link from the top of the
transport infrastructure priority list following the election. Shortly
thereafter the contracts were broken.

The paper’s contribution is to illustrate
how the politics of transport evolves and is played out.Any decision to remove the community from the
processes that determine the priorities of transport investment, are inherently
political decisions and therefore any attempt to depoliticise decision making,
be that through streamlining decision making or by narrowing the scope for
citizen participation, only serves to hyper politicise projects. A key
conclusion of the paper is the need for new urban governance settings that both
respond to and embrace the political aspects of transport planning and decision
making.But in the absence of inclusive
governance arrangements, politically engaged citizens will go to great lengths
to create their own spaces where deliberations about transport problems,
priorities and investments can occur, but in a manner that allows alternative
transport futures to also be considered. These informal processes offer an
illustration of the redemocratisation of transport planning. To the extent that
citizens can influence transport decision making (and they can!), a closed
system of transport decision making does not close down debate and community action.

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Urban Studies is the leading interdisciplinary journal for critical urban research and issues. Since it was first published in 1964 to provide an international forum for research into the fields of urban and regional studies, the journal has expanded to encompass the increasing range of disciplines and approaches that have been brought to bear on urban and regional issues